This subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to diagnostic imaging systems, and more particularly to Nuclear Medicine (NM) imaging systems with multiple detectors on a gantry.
In NM imaging, radiopharmaceuticals are taken internally and then detectors (e.g., gamma cameras), typically mounted on a gantry, capture and form images from the radiation emitted by the radiopharmaceuticals. The NM images primarily show physiological function of, for example, a patient or a portion of a patient being imaged.
In some types of scans, such as when scanning the whole body or with large patients, the portion of the patient being imaged may require the entire field of view of a conventional large size imaging detector. However, when imaging a structure that is smaller than the field of view of the imaging detector, such as the heart, liver, kidney, brain, breast or a tumor, portions of the imaging detector will acquire patient data outside of the structure of interest. Therefore, an effective sensitivity is decreased that is unrelated to collimator geometrical sensitivity, but results from the opportunity lost by not collecting useful information.
Many types of scans also require imaging from a number of axial positions around the patient. For example, conventional imaging detectors often acquire data while being rotated by a gantry around at least a portion of the patient, such as 180 degrees and up to 360 degrees, to obtain sufficient data of the structure for volumetric imaging and processing. This is a time consuming imaging process, particularly for organ specific imaging, which thereby limits patient throughput.